Alt Binaries

Your partner leaves dishes in the sink. Not once. Reliably. You mention this to two friends.

Friend A says: “Hold them to a higher standard. If they keep doing this, they don’t respect you enough to change.”

Friend B says: “People are messy. Love the whole person, dishes and all. The moment you start keeping score, you’ve turned your relationship into a performance review.”

Both of these feel right. Both of them, followed to their logical endpoint, will ruin your life. Friend A produces someone who leaves every relationship the moment it gets imperfect (which is immediately). Friend B produces someone who stays with a person who treats them terribly and calls it acceptance.

This is today’s binary. And I did not come up with it.

A blogger named thekinginyellow wrote a post back in 2012 that pointed me to the worldbuilding in Nobilis, a tabletop RPG by Jenna Moran. Most fiction does Heaven and Hell in one of three boring ways: Heaven good / Hell evil, Heaven fascist / Hell sympathetic rebels, or both sides bad so humans can do the protagonist thing. Moran did something much more interesting. She made both sides simultaneously sympathetic and horrifying, and once thekinginyellow laid out her framework, it broke my brain. I’ve been turning it over ever since.

Heaven, in Nobilis, is a power of grace and beauty. The angels work tirelessly to make the world more glorious, to elevate everything to its highest potential. Beautiful. Inspiring. Also: they have no tolerance for things that can’t meet the standard. They will improve what can be improved and destroy what can’t. They have shut the actual gates of Heaven to most of humanity, for fear of contamination. Because standards.

Hell chose to fall specifically because it couldn’t accept the idea that anything is undeserving of love. The devils love everything. Especially the corrupt, the broken, the ugly, the failing. They love the worst things the most, because the worst things need it the most. And (here is where it gets creepy) they spend so much time in the company of corruption that they’ve come to prefer it. They want the universe to be as bad as possible, so they can demonstrate how much they cherish it anyway.

Once you see this pattern, it’s everywhere. How people talk about art, about parenting, about food, about what it means to love another human being. The question underneath all of it is: does something need to be good to deserve your love, or does your love exist independent of whether the thing is good?

And the uncomfortable follow-up: what does your answer say about you?

(I’m going to walk through this one carefully, because the failure modes are both bad enough to ruin lives, and most of us are doing one of them right now without noticing.)

Imagine you’re a teacher grading essays.

You have thirty students. Five of them wrote genuinely excellent papers. Twenty of them wrote fine papers. Five of them turned in something that is, to be charitable, not their best work. The question is not what grade you give each paper. The question is what you feel when you read each one, and what that feeling makes you do.

The Heaven teacher reads the five excellent papers and feels joy. Genuine joy. This is what teaching is for. These students understood the material, engaged with it creatively, produced something worth reading. The Heaven teacher gives those papers the praise they deserve, detailed and specific, because excellence should be recognized. Then the Heaven teacher reads the five bad papers and feels something else: frustration, or disappointment, or (in the sharper version of this impulse) a kind of contempt. These students didn’t try. Or they tried and failed, which might be worse, because it suggests they reached their limit and their limit is here. The Heaven teacher’s comments on these papers are either withering or absent. Why invest effort in work that doesn’t meet the bar?

The Hell teacher reads those same five bad papers and feels something completely different. A pull. A tenderness. These are the students who need me. The ones writing A papers will be fine no matter what. They have the talent and the drive and the world will reward them. But this kid, the one who wrote three paragraphs and two of them are the same paragraph copied twice (maybe hoping I wouldn’t notice, or maybe just lost), this is the kid whose essay I’m going to cover in comments. This is the kid I’m going to ask to stay after class. Not to scold them. To sit with them. Because somebody has to.

Now, both of these are real teachers. You’ve had both. You probably remember both. And if I asked you which one you’d want for your own kid, you’d probably say “it depends on the kid,” which is the correct answer, but notice that it already concedes the point: these are two different tools, and the right one depends on the situation.

But let’s push it further, because the interesting version of this binary isn’t about which teacher is “better.” It’s about what happens when each orientation becomes a worldview.

The Heaven worldview, fully committed, looks like this: the purpose of love (of attention, of care, of investment) is to honor what is worthy. You love a great novel because it is great. You love your partner because they are good. You love your country because it has achieved something admirable. When the thing you love stops being worthy, when the novel turns out to be plagiarized, when your partner betrays you, when your country does something shameful, the love should change. Not necessarily disappear, but change. Because love that doesn’t respond to the quality of its object isn’t love. It’s a reflex.

This worldview produces some extremely good things. It produces people who hold themselves to high standards. It produces criticism that is honest rather than sycophantic. It produces a culture where excellence is celebrated and mediocrity is not pretended away. If you’ve ever been in an environment where everyone tells everyone else their work is amazing regardless of whether it is, you know how suffocating that gets. The Heaven impulse is the one that says: no, actually, that could be better, and you know it, and I respect you enough to say so.

It also produces some deeply cruel things.

Because if love is conditional on quality, then the moment something falls below the line, it loses the right to be loved. And that “something” can be a painting, or a performance, or a person. The Heaven worldview, in its extreme form, is the parent who stops showing affection when their kid brings home a C. The partner who is warm and devoted when things are going well and turns cold the instant you fail them. The friend who drops you when you’re no longer interesting. None of these people think they’re being cruel. They think they’re being principled. They’re honoring the standard. They’re refusing to pretend that what’s broken is whole.

And the thing is, they’re right about the thing being broken. The kid did get a C. You did fail your partner. You did become less interesting. The Heaven eye sees clearly. Its vision is accurate. The problem is that accuracy, by itself, doesn’t save anyone.

Now flip it.

The Hell worldview, fully committed, looks like this: the purpose of love is to be given to things that need it, especially things that can’t earn it. You love the flawed novel because someone poured their life into it and no one else will read it. You love your partner even when they’re at their worst, especially when they’re at their worst, because that’s when it counts. You love your country not because of its achievements but because it’s yours and it’s broken and it needs you.

This worldview also produces some extremely good things. It produces people who stay. Who show up at the hospital, who answer the phone at 3 AM, who sit with you in the mess without asking how you got there. It produces the kind of loyalty that doesn’t flinch. If you’ve ever been at the lowest point of your life and had someone love you not despite the fact that you were a disaster but seemingly because of it, you know how world-altering that experience is. The Hell impulse is the one that says: I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care what you did. You are not going to go through this alone.

It also produces some deeply sick things.

Because if love is given most intensely to things that are broken, then brokenness becomes the prerequisite for love. And this creates a set of incentives that are, to put it mildly, perverse. The Hell worldview, in its extreme form, is the person who always dates people who need saving and is bored by people who are fine. The nonprofit that measures its own worth by how dire its clients’ situations are rather than by whether anyone’s situation improves. The friend who is incredibly present during your crisis and quietly vanishes when you get your life together, because you’re no longer providing them with a sense of purpose.

There’s a version of this that Moran captures with brutal precision: the devils want the universe to be as bad as possible so they can demonstrate how much they love it anyway. Read that twice. It’s a love that needs suffering to operate. It is, in its purest form, a love that would prefer you broken, because your brokenness is the stage on which its compassion performs.

One way to see this binary playing out in the real world is to look at how people argue about art.

There is a certain kind of person (Heaven) who believes that the purpose of criticism is to separate the great from the merely good, and the good from the garbage. This person has a canon. They can tell you the difference between a B+ album and an A- album and they care about that difference intensely. They think that pretending bad art is good is a form of disrespect, both to the audience and to the artist, who deserves to know where they stand. When they love something, their love is ferocious precisely because it’s earned. You have to clear the bar to get their attention.

There is another kind of person (Hell) who believes that the purpose of engaging with art is to find something worth loving in it, regardless of its quality by conventional standards. This person has sat through a bad movie and focused on the one scene that worked, the one performance that tried, the one moment of genuine feeling amid the wreckage. They are not confused about the movie being bad. They just don’t think badness is a reason to withhold love. When they love something, their love is fierce precisely because no one else is offering it. They’re the last person in the room who hasn’t left.

Both of these people are real, and you know both of them, and you’ve probably been both of them at different times in your life.

The tension becomes genuinely painful when you apply it to people rather than movies.

Consider the question of whether to give money to someone on the street. The Heaven position is something like: charity should be directed toward maximum impact. Give to organizations with proven track records. Don’t give cash to individuals whose situation you don’t understand, because your good intentions might subsidize the very thing that’s destroying them. Hold your compassion to a standard. Make it effective. Make it count. There is a version of this that is genuinely wise and a version that is a well-reasoned excuse to walk past suffering without feeling anything.

The Hell position is something like: a person is standing in front of you, right now, asking for help, and you’re going to walk past them because your spreadsheet says a different person somewhere else would use the money more efficiently? This person is here. Whatever brought them here, whatever they’ll do with the money, they are a human being in front of you and they are suffering and you can do something about it in this exact moment. There is a version of this that is genuinely compassionate and a version that makes the giver feel important while changing nothing.

There is a deep cut from the world of competitive Pokémon that illustrates this binary with almost painful clarity. In competitive play, there are tiers. The highest tier (OU, for “overused”) consists of the strongest Pokémon, the ones everyone uses because they’re the best. Below that are increasingly obscure tiers: UU, RU, NU, PU, and so on down. The naming of the lowest tier is widely understood to be a poop joke.

There are two kinds of competitive players. One kind plays OU exclusively. They want to use the best tools, face the best opponents, and test themselves against the highest standard of play. They have no interest in a Pokémon that can’t compete at the top. Why would you use Sunflora when Venusaur exists? That’s not a question driven by cruelty. It’s driven by reverence for the game at its best. They want to experience what’s possible when every constraint is optimized. This is Heaven.

The other kind goes deep into PU and finds the most hopeless, the most forgotten, the most structurally disadvantaged creature in the game, and builds a team around making it work. They know Luvdisc will never be good. They don’t care. They’re going to find the one niche, the one set of circumstances, the one matchup where Luvdisc does something no other Pokémon can do, and they’re going to love it for that. Not because it’s excellent. Because someone has to. This is Hell.

And the remarkable thing is that both players, when they talk about what they love, have the exact same light in their eyes.

The question I keep coming back to is whether these two orientations can coexist inside a single person, or whether choosing one always means betraying the other. In practice, most people oscillate. You’re Heaven about your work (you hold yourself to an exacting standard, you revise until it’s right, you’d rather produce nothing than produce something mediocre) and Hell about your friends (you love them in their mess, you don’t keep score, you show up regardless). Or you’re Hell about your work (every project is precious, every attempt is meaningful, nothing gets thrown away) and Heaven about your friendships (you expect loyalty and reciprocity and you cut people who don’t deliver).

The fully integrated version, the person who can do both consciously, looks like someone who can say: “This is excellent and I honor it” on Monday and “This is broken and I love it” on Tuesday, and mean both completely, and not feel that one cheapens the other. That’s harder than it sounds. Because Heaven always suspects that Hell’s love is cheap (if you love everything, you love nothing), and Hell always suspects that Heaven’s standards are heartless (if you can walk away from something just because it’s flawed, you never loved it at all).

Both suspicions are partially correct. Which is why this binary hurts.

• Restaurant reviews. A five-star-only reviewer who dismisses anything below a certain caliber of ingredient sourcing and technique is operating from Heaven: only excellence deserves the attention, and praising mediocrity degrades the craft. A reviewer who seeks out struggling neighborhood diners, family kitchens, weird one-person operations, and writes lovingly about a plate of rice and beans that was made with care even if it wouldn’t survive two minutes on a competition show is operating from Hell: the food doesn’t need to be great to deserve being noticed. Both produce reviews worth reading. Both, taken to their extreme, become useless.
• How people pick a favorite sports team. Some people root for whoever is playing the best ball right now. They follow dynasties. They appreciate dominance. When the dynasty fades, so does their interest, because the point was never loyalty, it was witnessing excellence. Others root for the Cubs, or Sunderland, or whatever local franchise has been bad for longer than some countries have existed. They don’t root for the team because it’s good. They root for it because it’s theirs and it’s terrible and their love is the only thing standing between this franchise and the void. Ask someone in the second group why they don’t just pick a better team and watch their face. You have said something genuinely incomprehensible to them.
• Hiring decisions. One manager hires strictly on credentials, track record, and demonstrated skill: you earn your way in by being the best candidate, full stop. Another manager hires the person who shows raw potential but hasn’t had the chance, the one with the nontraditional background, the one who wouldn’t survive the résumé screen but might be extraordinary with support. Both managers have defensible philosophies. Both can point to spectacular successes and spectacular failures produced by their approach.
• Wikipedia’s notability wars. Wikipedia has a long-running internal conflict between “deletionists” (who believe the encyclopedia should only contain articles about subjects that meet strict notability standards) and “inclusionists” (who believe that if someone cared enough to write an article about their local train station, that act of caring is itself a kind of value). The deletionists are Heaven: the encyclopedia should be excellent, and excellence requires curation. The inclusionists are Hell: knowledge doesn’t need to be important to deserve being preserved. This argument has been going on for twenty years and will never be resolved.
• Whether to finish a book you’re not enjoying. The Heaven move is to put it down. Life is short. There are masterpieces you haven’t read yet, and every hour spent on a book that isn’t rewarding you is an hour you’re not spending with one that would. The Hell move is to keep going. Someone wrote this. Someone spent years on it. It might not be working for you, but it’s trying, and something in you wants to meet it where it is, to find the one passage, the one image, the one sentence that justifies the whole thing. (I have done both of these. I cannot tell you which one I respect more.)

There is a fresco in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, sixth century, where the angels process on one wall and the saints process on the other, both moving toward the same altar, and the gold of the background is the same gold, the tesserae cut from the same stone, and yet somehow the angels’ gold is colder. Sharper. It catches the light like a blade. The saints’ gold absorbs it. Drinks it in. You can stand in that church for an hour and not understand why one wall feels like being judged and the other feels like being held until you realize that the entire building is a cosmological argument about the nature of love, and that the argument was old when the mosaics were new, and that the mosaicists knew it, and set the tiles at fractionally different angles to make the light itself take sides.

The rabbis of the Talmud argued about whether God’s primary attribute was din (judgment) or rachamim (mercy), and one school held that the world was created first in pure judgment and it could not stand, so God mixed mercy into it, and another school held that the world was created first in pure mercy and it could not stand, so God mixed judgment into it, and neither school won because neither school was wrong. The argument was the point. The argument is the architecture. If you build a world on judgment alone, everything beautiful is preserved and everything flawed is annihilated and eventually the only thing left is a single perfect crystal in an empty room and there is no one there to see it because no one was good enough to be admitted. If you build a world on mercy alone, everything is preserved, the tumor alongside the tissue, the rot alongside the fruit, and the mercy that saves the worst also degrades the best, because in a world where nothing can be rejected, excellence has no meaning and the word “good” dissolves into a warm fog that covers everything equally and illuminates nothing.

Heaven looks at the shepherd in pen four. Magnificent. Purposeful. Every line of him bred with care. To look at that animal and not feel reverence is to be dead inside. This is what deserves to be chosen. Hell looks at the dog in pen eleven. One ear gone, skin condition, one cloudy eye. Found under a shed. Stopped barking. Stopped expecting. Four months and no one has asked about her. She has no one. And Hell says: that is exactly why.

The angels shut the doors of paradise to keep out contamination. The devils go looking for what the angels threw away. Both are expressions of love so intense they become monstrous, because love, real love, is monstrous, it is too large for the body that carries it and too specific for the abstractions we build to contain it, and the only honest thing anyone has ever said about it is that it fails. Heaven’s love fails by excluding. Hell’s love fails by consuming. The shepherd will be adopted by someone who sees him and feels awe, because awe is easy when its object is beautiful, and that is both its gift and its limitation. The dog in pen eleven will die in there, unless someone walks in who loves differently, who is drawn to the thing no one else wants, and whether that impulse is mercy or vanity or some impossible alloy of both is a question that the person feeling it cannot answer and the dog does not care about.

You know which one you are. Not always. Not about everything. But there’s a lean, a gravitational pull, a place your heart goes when it’s not watching itself. Toward the bright thing. Toward the broken thing. Toward the six magnificent things or toward everything else that gets to be alone. You didn’t choose it, or maybe you did, or maybe the choice was made so long ago that it feels like temperament now, feels like bone, feels like the angle at which your particular set of tiles was laid before you were born, catching the light in the only direction you know how to face.

The saw and the hammer. Use both. Forgive both for what they cannot do.

Sources and Further Reading

thekinginyellow: Heaven and Hell: A summary of the Heaven and Hell factions in Jenna Moran’s Nobilis RPG, describing how angels seek to elevate the world to beauty (and destroy what can’t be elevated) while devils love everything unconditionally (and come to prefer corruption because it needs them most).

---

A Dialogue Concerning the Adoption of Dogs, or: What Deserves Your Heart

Drako Valentis and Nicolete Sangbelles are at the Haven animal shelter. They have been sent to choose a dog for the Breaker compound. They have been here for two hours.

DRAKO: The shepherd in pen four. Look at him. That carriage. That focus. He tracked my hand before I even raised it. That is an animal that is exactly what a dog is supposed to be.

NICOLETE: He’s beautiful.

DRAKO: He’s magnificent. Someone bred him with care. Someone trained him with rigor. Every line of him is purposeful. To look at a creature like that and not feel something (respect, reverence, I don’t care what you call it) is to be dead inside. That is what deserves to be chosen.

NICOLETE: He’ll be adopted by the end of the week, Drako. Someone’s going to walk in here tomorrow and fall in love with him on sight. He doesn’t need us.

DRAKO: That’s not the question. The question isn’t who needs us. The question is what is worth honoring.

NICOLETE: Come look at pen eleven.

DRAKO: I’ve seen pen eleven.

NICOLETE: Come look.

[They walk. In pen eleven there is a dog of uncertain breed. It is missing most of one ear. It has a skin condition. When Nicolete kneels at the gate, it does not approach. It watches from the far corner with one cloudy eye.]

NICOLETE: They found her under a shed. She’d been there long enough that she’d stopped barking. The intake notes say she doesn’t respond to touch yet. She’s been here four months. No one has asked about her.

DRAKO: For obvious reasons.

NICOLETE: Yes. For obvious reasons. And that’s exactly why she’s the one.

DRAKO: Because she’s damaged?

NICOLETE: Because she has no one. Because every person who walks through this building looks at her and looks away. Because if love only flows toward things that are already beautiful, it’s not love. It’s applause.

DRAKO: And what you’re doing isn’t love either. It’s pity dressed up in a nicer word. You don’t look at that animal and feel joy. You feel sorrow. You want to save her because her suffering makes your compassion feel important. The shepherd makes you feel nothing because he doesn’t need you, and you can’t stand that.

NICOLETE: That’s not fair.

DRAKO: It’s completely fair. I look at that shepherd and feel awe. Genuine awe. I feel grateful that something that good exists. That’s a pure response to something worthy. You look at this animal and feel a wound, and you’ve decided the wound is holier than the awe. But it isn’t. The ache to fix broken things is not a higher calling than the reverence for whole ones.

NICOLETE: No one said it was higher. I said it was necessary. The shepherd will be loved. That’s guaranteed. His whole life will be someone adoring him. And he deserves that. I’m not arguing he doesn’t. But this dog in pen eleven will die in here. She will die without anyone ever having chosen her. And something in the world will be a little more wrong because of it. Not because she’s useful. Not because she’ll become a great dog with enough patience. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll always be skittish and strange and not what anyone wanted. But the fact that nothing should go unloved—

DRAKO: You keep saying that. “Nothing should go unloved.” Do you hear what that requires? It requires that your love has nothing to do with what the thing is. You’d love a rock. You’d love a tumor. If it existed and it suffered, you’d love it, and you’d call that virtue instead of what it actually is, which is a refusal to distinguish.

NICOLETE: You say that like distinguishing is a gift. It’s not always a gift. Your eye for excellence is the same eye that looks at pen eleven and feels nothing. You’ve refined your capacity for admiration so sharply that most of the world falls below the cut. You walk through life in love with six things.

DRAKO: Six magnificent things.

NICOLETE: And everything else gets to be alone.

[Silence. The dog in pen eleven has moved slightly closer to the gate. Not much. An inch or two.]

DRAKO: Let me ask you something honestly. If that dog were healthy, beautiful, well-trained (if she were everything the shepherd is) would you still want her?

NICOLETE: Of course.

DRAKO: As much?

NICOLETE: …That’s a strange question.

DRAKO: It’s the only question. If she were perfect, if she needed nothing from you, if she would be loved regardless, would you feel this same pull? Or does the pull come from the fact that she’s wretched, and your love is the only love she’ll ever get, and there’s something in you that needs that? That needs to be the only one?

NICOLETE: You’re describing care like it’s a vanity project.

DRAKO: I’m describing the version of care that needs misery to feed on. The devils love the corrupt things best. Do you know why? Because in the presence of beauty, unconditional love becomes cheap. Anyone can love the shepherd. It takes nothing. But to love that—

[He gestures at pen eleven.]

DRAKO: —that proves something. And you want to prove it. And part of me understands that, and part of me thinks it’s the most selfish form of generosity I’ve ever encountered.

NICOLETE: And choosing the shepherd because he makes you feel awe isn’t selfish? You want to take home a trophy. A living monument to your own taste. You’ll admire him every day and feel confirmed in your belief that the world is full of beautiful things if you just refuse to look at the ugly ones.

DRAKO: He is not a trophy. He is excellent. Honoring excellence is not vanity.

NICOLETE: And tending to suffering is not vanity either.

[Another silence. The dog in pen eleven has put her chin on the ground. She is not looking at them. She is not looking at anything.]

NICOLETE: [quietly] She stopped expecting anyone to come. That’s what the intake notes mean when they say she doesn’t respond to touch. She’s not aggressive. She’s finished. She gave up. And that happened while we were all here, in this building, walking past her pen to look at the beautiful dogs.

DRAKO: That is very sad. It is also not an argument for why she should be our dog.

NICOLETE: It’s the only argument I need.

DRAKO: You are the most unreasonable person I have ever respected.

NICOLETE: I know.

[Drako looks at the shepherd in pen four. Then at the dog in pen eleven. He stands there for a long time.]

DRAKO: She’ll never be a good dog.

NICOLETE: Probably not.

DRAKO: She won’t guard anything. She won’t learn commands. She’ll hide under furniture for the first three months and she’ll never fully trust anyone and people will ask why we picked her and we won’t have an answer they’ll accept.

NICOLETE: I know.

DRAKO: You’re going to name her something gentle and ridiculous, aren’t you.

NICOLETE: I was thinking Biscuit.

DRAKO: Of course you were.

[He opens the gate to pen eleven. The dog doesn’t move. Nicolete sits on the ground inside the pen, a few feet away from her, and waits.]

DRAKO: [still standing, looking at the shepherd one last time] He really is a perfect animal.

NICOLETE: He really is.

DRAKO: Someone will choose him.

NICOLETE: Someone always does.